Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday January 14, 2011 @02:37PM
from the ceti-alpha-five-not-involved dept.

cold fjord writes "A scientist has made a weird and wonderful find. 'It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something... alive.' The Geological Society of America's current issue of GSA Today has the academic paper."

Did he say anything about anyone skin? All I see is the name of a city. St. Louis MO can be pretty bad, but East St Louis IL is much worse. It's an observable fact and there is nothing racist about it.

After their amazing rescue the bacteria were interviewed by Anderson Cooper. The bacteria expressed their thanks for being rescued from their 34,000 years of imprisonment in a salt tomb in Death Valley. It's a miracle all the bacteria survived for the full 34,000 years and the bacteria thanked God for keeping them alive and their rescue. When asked what they planned to do all replied, "We're going to Disneyland!" The bacteria are expected to put in an appearance on the new Oprah network next week and have been offered their own reality series.

Meh, watching bacteria sit in a hibernation state for 34,000 years would still be more entertaining twenty minutes of Jersey Shore. It's kind of like how Purgatory is better than Hell, even those it's incredibly uneventful.

Then, I appreciated the cultural satire with some envy of the other AC for doing it brilliantly.

Then, I shook my head in disgust because of the truth of it.

Then, I imagined one of the bacteria insisting on being referred to as "The Bacteria" (showing off his well defined flagella) and another one being "Bact-Wow" and yet another one (the fat one with too much makeup on its pili) being called "Pookie".

But God is almighty, so he could have created these bacteria with an lower C-14 carbon fraction so the scientist would be fooled into thinking they were 34000 yo. He would of course do this because only the really faithfull will survive the (zombi)Apocalypse. He is just to lazy to pick all their brains and find it out for real.

And Fox News complained that this does not fall in line with their version of reality which only goes back 6000 years or so, and does not include dinosaurs. Praise fucking Jesus and be sure and get your Glenn Beck Survival Backpack with your Cash For Gold money! And stop posting pictures of Sarah Palin with a target on her face and a caption reading; "Dump your load here!" That would not be fair!

Schubert and Lowenstein are not the first to uncover organisms that are astonishingly long-lived. About a decade ago, there were claims of discoveries of 250-million-year-old bacteria. The results weren't reproduced, and remain controversial.
Schubert, however, was able to reproduce his results. Not only did he grow the same organisms again in his own lab, he sent crystals to another lab, which then got the same results.
"So this wasn't something that was just a contaminant from our lab," Schubert said.

The article also mentions that his original finding was about a year ago, but his work is actually being published now.

Missing from the summary is that there were algae present in the salt crystals as well, and that they likely contributed to the survivability of the bacteria. I'm really curious how the algae survived though!

In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream - and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preseved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.

The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the news of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in a frozen state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.

As for us, however - we understood instantly. We could picture the entrire scene right down to the smallest details: how those present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first, they tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.

We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too were from that powerful tribe of Zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.

MacReady: I dunno, it's like this: thousands of years ago this spaceship crashes, and this thing, whatever it is, jumps out or crawls out and gets entombed in the ice.Garry: So, the Norwegians find it, and they dig it out of the ice...MacReady: That's right, Garry. They dig it up, they cart it back to their base. Somehow it gets thawed, it wakes up, probaly not the best of moods, and... I don't know, I wasn't there!

Welll.... it does come down to some arbitrary distinctions. I would say that "age" like that of a human, is different from that of a single cell organism. Think of it... mitosis happens, two new copies of nuclear DNA exist... then the cell splits (I know, plenty of variation in the process....)... now...

do we have one old cell and one new one? If so, which is the old one? Or two new cells? Or are they both the old cell? Here we can show the age of a cell to go all the way back to its lineal origin, or... to